Curumins no estúdio fotográfico: identidade, estúdio fotográfico, impressão e circulação (1888-1910)

Abstract

This monograph analyzes the presence of Bororo boys photographed in a photographic studio in Rio de Janeiro in the final decades of the 19th century, perceiving the context that involved the production of these children's photographs and discussing authorship and circulation of the images from the 1890s onwards. Indigenous people’s photos were plentiful in the period, motivated as much by science and their racial theories as by the fashion of carte-de-visite and postcards. However, it is rare to find biographical information about the individuals photographed, who are simply transformed into “human types”, representing their entire “race” so that their identities are lost under ethnonyms (often erroneous) indicated by photographers, editors and buyers. In the case of the photographs investigated in this monograph, it is possible to identify some biographical information about the boys photographed, so that these photos, while being used as photographs of human types, escape this pattern. Its exceptionality lies in the identification of the models and in the possibility of tracing their trajectories (even if incomplete). This is possible by the fact that one of the children photographed was adopted by an influential white family in 1888, whose adoptive mother wrote a memoir booklet about her adopted son. From the secondary textual sources, it is possible to question the narrative(s) constructed about these photographs, both by the photographer and by those who collected them. By rescuing the trajectories of the models, we seek to discuss not only who were the indigenous boys taken to the photographic studio, but also what made it possible their going to the studio, what was the purpose of the photographs and how these children became anonymous as their photos were edited and printed in various media.